These three papers lay out some of the basic arguments for why ancient cities might be relevant for understanding contemporary urbanization and its environmental impact today. The phrase "might be relevant" is important; I will return to it below.

We were asked by UGEC Viewpoints to say something about the policy implications of research, so I give a few opinions on that matter. Briefly, planners and policy makers don't care about ancient cities, and they are not going to look at our archaeological findings to provide clues or guidance for contemporary urban issues. But enlightened planners and policy makers do care about research on cities and urbanism in general, and if archaeologists can provide data to broaden that more general body of research, then our results might have an indirect effect on policy or planning.

The second paper in the UGEC Viewpoints special section is: Scarborough,
Vernon L., Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase (2012) Low-Density
Urbanism, Sustainability, and IHOPE-Maya: Can the Past Provide More than
History?
They talk about the project IHOPE-Maya, which involves a number of specialists in Maya archaeology and some formal modelers who are examining Classic Maya society in terms of concept or resilience and sustainability. This is an exciting endeavor. The Maya had fascinating cities and distinctive urban social and cultural expressions, but most fieldwork has been very particularistic. That is, archaeologists excavate Maya sites to learn about Maya sites, without much comparative analysis and without much concern with using their results to shed light on broader questions. The authors state,

"With respect to the ancient Maya, determining the degree to which they successfully altered their environs – or regionally damaged it – within the constraints of their technologies and innovations has great potential for assessing present-day societal adaptations." (p. 20)

This is an important new direction for Maya studies. I must admit that I find some of the article puzzling. I am not sure what the authors mean by this statement:

"Perhaps our Western technologies are now finally poised to revisit a notion of urbanism reclaimed from the past." (p.21)

They go on to make a comparison between Maya and modern urbanism that seems very abstract:

"the internet and the cultivation of market-driven co-operatives based in rural settings are the loose equivalent of the roads and calendars (the internet) and resource-specialized communities (the cooperatives) of the Maya." (p.22)

"how deep-rooted the modernist perception of urban essentialism has been over the last century, dominating and streamlining how we tend to think about urbanism as a largely uniform type of social formation, even in the pre-modern past." (p.27)

In other words, many people--both the public and scholars--have this idea that there is a single kind of urbanism and a single kind of city, when in fact there is much variation around the world and through history. Isendahl focuses on the topic of urban agriculture, and how it goes against the standard western view that rural and urban and completely different and opposed settings:

"The body of evidence indicates that agricultural production cannot comfortably be regarded as ‘the antithesis of the city’ — as common essentialist-flavored understandings of urbanity seem to suggest — but is in many cases a fully integrated urban activity, viewed at the long-term and global scales." (p.28)

Above, I use the phrase "might be relevant" for the role of ancient cites in contributing to our knowledge of general patterns of urbanization today. Here is the problem. While archaeologists have lots of data on issues of cities and the environment, resilience, social patterns, and so on, we have yet to analyze those data in a framework that can be used by scholars working on contemporary urbanism. Right now, about all we can do is bring up some isolated examples. So while there are some urban scholars out there who think that past cities are relevant to contemporary concerns, archaeologists have yet to get our act together to produce reliable scientific findings that those scholars could use. This is the basic theme of Smith (2010). For a broader statement of the idea that archaeological can contribute to wider social-science research, see Smith et al. (2012).

For more discussion of these issues, look over my past posts, and check out some of these papers:

About Me

I am an archaeologist who works on Aztec sites and Teotihuacan.I do comparative and transdisciplinary research on cities, and also households, empires, and city-states. I view my discipline, archaeology, as a Comparative Historical Social Science.
My home pageMy papers to downloadMy page on Academia.edu
Twitter: @MichaelESmith
I am Professor in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change at Arizona State University; Affiliated Faculty in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning; Fellow, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems; Core Faculty in the Center for Social Dynamics Complexity. Also, I have an affiliation with the Colegio Mexiquense in Toluca, Mexico.